Tag: scrum master

The scrum framework is forever tied to the language of sports in general and rugby in particular. We organize our project work around goals, sprints, points, and daily scrums. An unfortunate consequence of organizing projects around a sports metaphor is that the language of gaming ends up driving behavior. For example, people have a natural inclination to associate the idea of story points to a measure of success rather than an indicator of the effort required to complete the story. The more points you have, the more successful you are. This is reflected in an actual quote from a retrospective on things a team did well:

We completed the highest number of points in this sprint than in any other sprint so far.

This was a team that lost sight of the fact they were the only team on the field. They were certain to be the winning team. They were also destine to be he losing team. They were focused on story point acceleration rather than a constant, predictable velocity.

More and more I’m finding less and less value in using story points as an indicator for level of effort estimation. If Atlassian made it easy to change the label on JIRA’s story point field, I’d change it to “Fuzzy Bunnies” just to drive this idea home. You don’t want more and more fuzzy bunnies, you want no more than the number you can commit to taking care of in a certain span of time typically referred to as a “sprint.” A team that decides to take on the care and feeding of 50 fuzzy bunnies over the next two weeks but has demonstrated – sprint after sprint – they can only keep 25 alive is going to lose a lot of fuzzy bunnies over the course of the project.

It is difficult for people new to scrum or Agile to grasp the purpose behind an abstract idea like story points. Consequently, they are unskilled in how to use them as a measure of performance and improvement. Developing this skill can take considerable time and effort. The care and feeding of fuzzy bunnies, however, they get. Particularly with teams that include non-technical domains of expertise, such as content development or learning strategy.

A note here for scrum masters. Unless you want to exchange your scrum master stripes for a saddle and spurs, be wary of your team turning story pointing into an animal farm. Sizing story cards to match the exact size and temperament from all manner of animals would be just as cumbersome as the sporting method of story points. So, watch where you throw your rope, Agile cowboys and cowgirls.

In Part 1 of this series, we set the frame for how to use time as a metric for assessing Agile team and project health. In Part 2, we looked at shifts in the cross-over point between burn-down and burn-up charts. In Part 3, we’ll look at other asymmetries and anomalies that can appear in time burn-down/burn-up charts and explore the issues the teams may be struggling with under these circumstances.

Figure 1 shows a burn-up that by the end of the sprint significantly exceeded the starting value for the original estimate.

Figure 1

There isn’t much mystery around a chart like this. The time needed to complete the work was significantly underestimated. The mystery is in the why and what that led to this situation.

Depending on the tools used to capture team metrics, it can be helpful to look at individual performances. What’s the differential between story points and estimated time vs actual time for each team member? Hardly every useful as a disciplinary tool, this type of analysis can be invaluable for knowing who needs professional development and in what areas.

In this case, there were several technical challenges related to new elements of the underlying architecture and the team put in extra hours to resolve them. Even so, they were unable to complete all the work they committed to in the sprint. The the scrum master and product owner need to monitor this so it isn’t a recurrent event or they risk team burnout and morale erosion if left unchecked. There are likely some unstated dependencies or skill deficiencies that need to be put on the table for discussion during the retrospective.

Figure 2 shows, among other things, unexpected jumps in the burn-down chart. There is clearly a significant amount of thrashing evident in the burn-down (which stubbornly refuses to actually burn down.)

Figure 2

Questions to explore:

Are cards being brought into the sprint after the sprint has started and why?

Are original time estimates being changed on cards after the sprint has started?

Is there a stakeholder in the grass, meddling with the team’s commitment?

Was a team member added to the team and cards brought into the sprint to accommodate the increased bandwidth?

Whatever is causing the thrashing, is the team (delivery team members, scrum master, and product owner) aware of the changes?

Scope change during a sprint is a very undesirable practice. Not just because it goes against the scrum framework, but more so because it almost always has an adverse effect on team morale and focus. If there is an addition to the team, better to set that person to work helping teammates complete the work already defined in the sprint and assign them cards in the next sprint.

If team members are adjusting original time estimates for “accuracy” or whatever reason they may provide, this is little more than gaming the system. It does more harm than good, assuming management is Agile savvy and not intent on using Agile metrics for punitive purposes. On occasion I’ve had to hide the original time estimate entry field from the view of delivery team members and place it under the control of the product owner – out of sight, out of mind. It’s less a concern to me that time estimates are “wrong,” particularly if time estimate accuracy is showing improvement over time or the delta is a somewhat consistent value. I can work with an delivery team member’s time estimates that are 30% off if they are consistently 30% off.

In the case of Figure 2 it was the team’s second sprint and at the retrospective the elephant was called out from hiding: The design was far from stable. The decision was made to set aside scrum in favor of using Kanban until the numerous design issues could be resolved.

Figure 3 shows a burn-down chart that doesn’t go to zero by the end of the sprint.

Figure 3

The team missed their commit and quite a few cards rolled to the next sprint. Since the issue emerged late in the sprint there was little corrective action that could be taken. The answers were left to discovery during the retrospective. In this case, one of the factors was the failure to move development efforts into QA until late in the sprint. This is an all too common issue in cases where the sprint commitments were not fully satisfied. For this team the QA issue was exacerbated by the team simply taking on more than they thought they could commit to completing. The solution was to reduce the amount of work the team committed to in subsequent sprints until a stable sprint velocity emerged.

Conclusion

For a two week sprint on a project that is 5-6 sprints in, I usually don’t bother looking at time burn-down/burn-up charts for the first 3-4 days. Early trends can be misleading, but by the time a third of the sprint has been completed this metric will usually start to show trends that suggest any emergent problems. For new projects or for newly formed teams I typically don’t look at intra-sprint time metrics until much later in the project life cycle as there are usually plenty of other obvious and more pressing issues to work through.

I’ll conclude by reiterating my caution that these metrics are yard sticks, not micrometers. It is tempting to read too much into pretty graphs that have precise scales. Rather, the expert Agilest will let the metrics, whatever they are, speak for themselves and work to limit the impact of any personal cognitive biases.

In this series we’ve explored several ways to interpret the signals available to us in estimated time burn-down and actual time burn-up charts. There are numerous others scenarios that can reveal important information from such burn-down/burn-up charts and I would be very interested in hearing about your experiences with using this particular metric in Agile environments.

In Part 1 of this series, we set the frame for how to use time as a metric for assessing Agile team and project health. In Part 2, we’ll look at shifts in the cross-over point between burn-down and burn-up charts and explore what issues may be in play for the teams under these circumstances.

Figure 1 shows a cross-over point occurring early in the sprint.

Figure 1

This suggests the following questions:

Is the team working longer hours than needed? If so, what is driving this effort? Are any of the team members struggling with personal problems that have them working longer hours? Are they worried they may have committed to more work than they can complete in the sprint and are therefore trying to stay ahead of the work load? Has someone from outside the team requested additional work outside the awareness of the product owner or scrum master?

Has the team over estimated the level of effort needed to complete the cards committed to the sprint? If so, this suggests an opportunity to coach the team on ways to improve their estimating or the quality of the story cards.

Has the team focused on the easy story cards early in the sprint and work on the more difficult story cards is pending? This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just something to know and be aware of after confirming this with the team. If accurate, it also points out the importance of using this type of metric for intra-sprint monitoring only and not extrapolate what it shows to a project-level metric.

The answer to these questions may not become apparent until later in the sprint and the point isn’t to try and “correct” the work flow based on relatively little information. In the case of Figure 1, the “easy” cards had been sized as being more difficult than they actually were. The more difficult cards were sized too small and a number of key dependencies were not identified prior to the sprint planning session. This is reflected in the burn-up line that significantly exceeds the initial estimate for the sprint, the jumps in the burn-down line, and subsequent failure to complete a significant portion of the cards in the sprint backlog. All good fodder for the retrospective.

Figure 2 shows a cross-over point occurring late in the sprint.

Figure 2

On the face of it there are two significant stretches of inactivity. Unless you’re dealing with a blatantly apathetic team, there is undoubtedly some sort of activity going on. It’s just not being reflected in the work records. The task is to find out what that activity is and how to mitigate it.

The following questions will help expose the cause for the extended periods of apparent inactivity:

Are one or more members not feeling well or are there other personal issues impacting an individual’s ability to focus?

Have they been poached by another project to work on some pressing issue?

Are they waiting for feedback from stakeholders, clients, or other team members?

Are the story cards unclear? As the saying goes, story cards are an invitation to a conversation. If a story card is confusing, contradictory, or unclear than the team needs to talk about that. What’s unclear? Where’s the contradiction? As my college calculus professor used to ask when teaching us how to solve math problems, “Where’s the source of the agony?”

The actual reasons behind Figure 2 were two fold. There was a significant technical challenge the developers had to resolve that wasn’t sufficiently described by any of the cards in the sprint and later in the sprint several key resources were pulled off the project to deal with issues on a separate project.

Figure 3 shows a similar case of a late sprint cross-over in the burn-down/burn-up chart. The reasons for this occurrence were quite different than those shown in Figure 2.

Figure 3

This was an early sprint and a combination of design and technical challenges were not as well understood as originally thought at the sprint planning session. As these issues emerged, additional cards were created in the product backlog to be address in future sprints. Nonetheless, the current sprint commitment was missed by a significant margin.

In Part 3, we’ll look at other asymmetries and anomalies that can appear in time burn-down/burn-up charts and explore the issues may be in play for the teams under these circumstances.

Some teams choose to use card level estimated and actual time as one of the level of effort or performance markers for project progress and health. For others it’s a requirement of the work environment due to management or business constraints. If your situation resembles one of these cases then you will need to know how to use time metrics responsibly and effectively. This series of articles will establish several common practices you can use to develop your skills for evaluating and leveraging time-based metrics in an Agile environment.

It’s important to keep in mind that time estimates are just one of the level of effort or performance markers that can be used to track team and project health. There can, and probably should be other markers in the overall mix of how team and project performance is evaluated. Story points, business value, quality of information and conversation from stand-up meetings, various product backlog characteristics, cycle time, and cumulative flow are all examples of additional views into the health and progress of a project.

In addition to using multiple views, it’s important to be deeply aware of the strengths and limits presented by each of them. The limits are many while the strengths are few. Their value comes in evaluating them in concert with one another, not in isolation. One view may suggest something that can be confirmed or negated by another view into team performance. We’ll visit and review each of these and other metrics after this series of posts on time.

The examples presented in this series are never as cut and dried as presented. Just as I previously described multiple views based on different metrics, each metric can offer multiple views. My caution is that these views shouldn’t be read like an electrocardiogram, with the expectation of a rigidly repeatable pattern from which a slight deviation could signal a catastrophic event. The examples are extracted from hundreds of sprints and dozens of projects over the course of many years and are more like seismology graphs – they reveal patterns over time that are very much context dependent.

Estimated and actual time metrics allow teams to monitor sprint progress by comparing time remaining to time spent. Respectively, this will be a burn-down and a burn-up chart in reference to the direction of the data plotted on the chart. In Figure 1, the red line represents the estimated time remaining (burn-down) while the green line represents the amount of time logged against the story cards (burn-up) over the course of a two week sprint. (The gray line is a hypothetical ideal for burn-down.)

Figure 1

The principle value of a burn-down/burn-up chart for time is the view it gives to intra-sprint performance. I usually look at this chart just prior to a teams’ daily stand-up to get a sense if there are any questions I need to be asking about emerging trends. In this series of posts we’ll explore several of the things to look for when preparing for a stand-up. At the end of the sprint, the burn-down/burn-up chart can be a good reference to use during the retrospective when looking for ways to improve.

The sprint shown in Figure 1 is about as ideal a picture as one can expect. It shows all the points I look for that tell me, insofar as time is concerned, the sprint performance is in good health.

There is a cross-over point roughly in the middle of the sprint.

At the cross-over point about half of the estimated time has been burned down.

The burn-down time is a close match to the burn-up at both the cross-over point and the end of the sprint.

The burn-down and burn-up lines show daily movement in their respective directions.

In Part 2, we’ll look at several cases where the cross-over point shifts and explore the issues the teams under these circumstances might be struggling with.

The dialog about the value of stand-up meetings is as vigorous as ever. I hope it never gets settled. That’s because I frequently argue both sides. Just not at the same time. Which side I’m on depends entirely on the context. If the team composed of a single functional domain that has worked together for an extended period of time while co-located in a tuned collaboration work environment, then stand-ups of any frequency are probably a waste of time. If the team is for the most part remote and composed of independent contractors representing multiple functional domains, than it can be argued that daily stand-ups become THE most important scrum meeting.

I want to talk about the latter scenario in this post. Remote stand-ups can be the most challenging meetings for a scrum master to facilitate. (In the interests of space, I’ll have to set aside cultural and language issues that are frequently an issue while running scrum with remote teams. I do this not to minimize the importance of these issues, but to recognize they are worthy of much better treatment than I can cover here.)

Remember the agile manifesto? The first two line read:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Simply stated: Don’t bother taking notes during a stand-up. Not as a group, anyway. Individual agile delivery team members are certainly free to do so if it helps their individual efforts. Stand-up notes are a false crutch. It’s as near to a 100% guarantee one can get to say that no one will every go back and re-read stand-up notes. If someone is demanding stand-up notes be taken, suspect a waterfall zombie in your midst and respond accordingly. Worse yet is that the poor agile delivery team member tasked with serving as scribe is going to be so busy trying to capture stuff they will miss much of the conversation and information exchange that makes a quality stand-up so vital.

Good Practices

Early in a project the scrum master should specifically call out team members during the stand-up and do so in a different order each day. This will prevent team members from talking over one another as they miss the visual cues that tell people meeting in person who is likely to speak next. Changing up the order keeps the whole team alert as they will not know when their name will be called. As the team gains experience with each other, switch to calling out the name of the team member who’ll kick off the stand-up conversation. When they’ve completed informing the team what they’ve worked on yesterday, what they’re working on today, and anything in the way of success the delivery team member calls out the next team member to take the conversation. This will further develop the remote behaviors that compensate for the missing non-verbal communication.

At least once a week, more frequent if warranted, briefly reiterate the sprint goals and minimum viable product (MVP) definition at the start of the stand-up. I’ve also found it very effective to challenge the team about mid-sprint with an intuitive check on how they are doing with respect to the sprint goals and MVP definition. Any feelings of dread there? Any sense of anxiety? If so, what’s causing that feeling. Move down the 5 Whys path to find any root causes. This will help shake out any hidden dependencies or reluctance by any one team member to ask for help.

Technology

Consider quality virtual meeting hardware and software an essential tool for your business. We wouldn’t accept a surgeon who goes into the operating room with kitchen knives because they’re “good enough.” Sound professional, be professional. Clear and efficient communication is essential to the success of remote agile teams. Have the best possible communication tools available in place and cut corners someplace else.

A good view of the scrum board via web conferencing. This is the big picture the team needs to keep their individual efforts in context of the whole sprint effort.

A high quality and reliable audio connection

How each team member’s cell reception? Does their connection drop frequently? Is their voice muffled or otherwise hard to hear? They may need a phone upgrade, particularly if their phone cannot leverage WiFi calling.

Are they on a land-line?

Are they using a cordless phone that’s subject to interference or cuts in and out?